‘I might be the only person on the planet for whom Scorsese’s Travis Bickle elicits such blithe and sentimental feeling.’
Photograph: Romas Foord for the Observer

I tend to become a little more quiet this time of year, to dress in plainer shapes and colours, to dread the tinselled parties and all their accompanying questions. In trying to evade any enquiries about my own plans or family, my tactic is often to ask after the smallest details of whichever acquaintance or stranger, the travel schedules and mulled wine recipes, exhaust them until their glasses are empty and they have to wend their way back to the bar. This isn’t the only way I’ve become an expert on the Yuletide traditions of others, but it’s good practice for the culminating event of Christmas, a holiday for which my only reliable tradition is a total lack of any. That I’ve sat at so many different tables on this day when what most people want is a sense of sameness, of time having temporarily fallen off, has become a kind of pride. Empanadas in Los Angeles or strudel on the snowy Canadian border, the thing that persists for me about the holiday is not a certain taste or smell but the richness of many, meals I’ve eaten not in loyalty to one part of my life but to the continuum of it, a measure every winter of how and with whom I hoped to be.

My parents had both died by the time I was 24, but they were not people drawn to the predictable and domestic, and in losing them I did not lose some holiday ritual I’ll always wish to take back. Journalists, divorced almost as quickly as they were married, acolytes of California counter-culture whose youth seemed it would never expire, they tended to treat each holiday as though it were a surprise to be reckoned with creatively. One year my father and I drove through the fog Hitchcock loved to Bodega Bay, where we opened presents in our laps while looking through the windshield, he discussing, plaintively and respectfully, the power of the ocean and the several times he had almost died inside it. The sailing incident off the coast of Tahiti, the ribbons and crumpled tissue around my scuffed-up sneakers, the circling shark during his years on Kauai, the gifts of novels and ceramics beyond my years and tastes between my knees. He drove us then to the only restaurant that was open, where the chowder arrived in bowls of dense, springy sourdough, maybe the only meal in which the eater is encouraged to truly clean her plate. It’s the first thing I want when I return to the place I grew up, where I rent weekend homes like a tourist, and it’s a dish I still eat like a kid, incapable of waiting for it to cool, swallowing the chunks of creamy celery whole. Any time I order it somewhere else, I end up asking about the recipe, wondering what’s missing, but of course what’s gone is my father, how much he loved the doom of the misty ocean, the strange nicknames he had for me, Jar of Honey, Peaches, I’ll never hear again.

‘If I order chowder now, I wonder what’s missing. But, of course, what’s gone is my father.’ Photograph: Romas Foord for the Observer

As for my mother, a lapsed Catholic turned Wiccan then Buddhist, she must have worried her lack of enthusiasm would be apparent, and we often spent Christmas with more decisive friends of hers, some of whom we also lived with. I probably still miss Tibor, who had fled Hungary for political reasons in the mid-80s, leaving behind a wife and child I learned quickly not to ask about, and worked a job he hated overseeing meals for airlines. His Christmas gift to himself was to stay in his pallid, rainbow-striped robe while he cooked goulash. As far as I could tell, the vital directive in the preparation of goulash was to step outside and smoke as often as possible, then to return to the simmering pot, tongue numbed, take a taste and mutter, like a military command, “Needs–more–paprikash.” My mother and his wife Doris off somewhere gossiping, we ate in front of the television, watching, I’m shocked to admit, Taxi Driver. It’s probably true no 10-year-old should watch this film, and also that I might be the only person on the planet for whom Scorsese’s Travis Bickle elicits such blithe and sentimental feeling. My mouth full with the adult taste of thyme and garlic, the chunks of potatoes steaming like the streets of 1970s New York, I watched Tibor watching, how he could cackle at misery. Maybe he gave me that along with his insistence on tasting as you went, wooden spoon aloft, and certain bleak dictums on romance he spouted to anyone without prompt. All love ends. Sooner or later, one of you dies. True, or not true? Christmas cards these were not, but there was something Santa-like about Tibor, how busily he fussed over what he plated even once people were eating it, interrupting them to offer more salt, an affectation of audibly popping his lips when something delighted him.

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On the Christmases when my mother was in charge, we always bought our tree last minute and left it up till March. While I read by its glow, she prepared the meals which we ate all year, tostadas whose colour composition I loved, the yellow of the tortilla giving way to the earthy brown of the beans, the green of the dewy lettuce to the red of the local quartered tomatoes. My mother had a habit of going without cooking utensils, spinning the hardening discs in the popping oil with her spindly fingers, popping them out with her hands and gasping at the heat. In so many waysI wonder why she went without the things that would have made her life safer, but also it seems lucky I ever got to eat something she handled so intimately. Though as a rules-obsessed child I burned with embarrassment at how late the tree was visible through our window, I can appreciate now how my mother emphasised what she enjoyed about a holiday she hated. “I don’t love Christmas,” I heard her say more than once, smoking in one of the drapey shawls that were her signature, watering the plants on the patio one-handed with a vaguely cowboy swagger, “but I do love Christmas lights.”

Even if she was irreverent about it, I hate to remember how the last Christmas my mother was alive was the first I didn’t fly home to see her. I was newly in love and eager to accept an invitation to what was surely the most traditional Christmas I’d ever have, at my boyfriend’s mother’s in snowy, gloomy Buffalo. An Austrian oncology researcher, she was the most precise and inscrutable individual I’ve ever met, the kind of person who weathers misfortune with only a pause and a sniff, who can prepare a five-course meal without leaving a single crumb or spill in the kitchen. We would fly up from Brooklyn to spend the week before Christmas in the winding, dustless house where she’d raised him, days during which relaxation and holiday cheer were as structured as anything else in her life. For a month ahead of time she baked, 10 varieties of holiday cookies she’d perfected some 30 years before, molasses chews, exactly half-dipped lady fingers. The unused bedrooms of the third floor she kept unheated, and in the one furthest from the stairs the near-freezing temperature made the ideal place for cookie storage, so much so that it was referred to as “The Cookie Room”. Noticing that there was a disparity in the selection she kept on the coffee table in the living room, where we always read by the fire in the hours before dinner, she would send me up to fetch the missing cookie that would make the display evenly varied again. In that room where nobody slept or dreamed, a 60s convex mirror hung over a teak credenza, I pried the tins open, gorging in secret on my favourite, perfect crescents of ginger topped with sinewy squares of chewy ginger candy, catching a look at myself and wondering whether this would be my life.

The winter after we split up, after years where we’d lived together like family, was one whose cold I felt coming a long way off. By October I was hyperventilating on subway platforms, unbuttoning and rebuttoning my jacket many times in the movies I went to alone, calling my friends too often with the nervous frequency of an empty nester, never saying what was really on my mind, which was that I did not know where I would be spending Christmas. In America, Thanksgiving always works like some sort of a rubric for how you’ll feel about 25 December, the training event for the emotional marathon, and there was nowhere I wanted to be but at the apartment of a friend who, in the close-knit circle of gay men where I am a rare female exception, we sometimes call Decadent Dan. His culinary and domestic skills are the sort that would send Martha Stewart into an envious rage and then right back to prison. The saviour of our excessive 20s and 30s, he is the person who sends a text at 10am, on a day our hangovers feel about as temporary as amputations, that says: come over for stew at 6.30. Dan’s kitchen table seats a tight six, so for larger meals we eat splayed around a marbled linoleum tabletop balanced on temporary wooden trestles, a semi-perilous arrangement for violent gesturers such as myself. During that perfect Thanksgiving last year, something hilarious someone said sent my hand down to clutch the edge of the table, and for half a second Dan’s mashed potatoes, velvety and gold-lit like impressionist clouds, the full glasses of barolo, hovered an inch above the surface. When nothing spilled or broke we clapped, lucky not for the first time that evening. I came home and took a photo of myself in my red long underwear, wanting proof of how flushed I’d become in being fed by my family.

The impending matter of Christmas finally split me open and I had to say it, on a call to a college friend across the country: I did not know where I would be spending it. With me, Lisette said, almost angry and bored with the question. In college she had been the person always ready with a mnemonic, with a clever storage solution, and Christmas Eve, at the apartment she shares with her fiancée Mike, was no different in terms of her fussy preparation. She bought hideous fleece socks in red and white polka dots, and if either of us were caught not wearing them she pointed at the transgressions of our feet with a brow knit in the comic exaggeration of a silent actor. For the group of five that came, Michael, who has the peculiar habit of taking physical notes on every conversation he has, made apple sausages and German pancakes. Because the latter had to be prepared individually, eggs and sugar and vanilla baking in half-size cast iron over 30 minutes, each guest was served separately, a birthday in miniature for which we were all envious and giddy. Christmas morning the three of us drove to Mike’s parents in a hilly and affluent neighbourhood by the ocean, the kind of house that always felt closed to me during a childhood without money, a place where every tawny painting, every woven bowl, came with a considered story of pride and acquisition. We ate tamales from husky orange dutch ovens, spicy pork and marinated chicken, with red salsa and green, with coffee someone was always refilling, saying freshen up your cup, freshen up your cup? Mike’s parents, who handled a stranger in their home on holiday with the enthusiastic grace of diplomats, asked me questions about my life, beginning with the recent and moving their way back, and I returned them like a journalist, posing earnest questions of my own. When we said goodbye in the early afternoon it was in the way of people who, having been a long time on a trip together, know the act of being alone again will take some readjusting – it seemed strange not to ask or answer, for the 30th time, are you warm enough? Close the window? Freshen up your cup?

This will be my seventh winter in New York City, but it’s the first Christmas I’ve spent here, so hellbent was I on hunting down the family, the place where it might be easier not to think of the outrageous stories my mother might have told, of the farcical journal she kept as a Catholic child, which she called The Diaries of Saint Carolyn of Sacramento, and which she staged readings of for her brothers as they floated in the backyard pool, plastic swords at the ready. On Christmas Eve I have some plans, quiet, solid, to visit Valeria and Álvaro, who have just bought a house in the Bronx where they will raise their beautiful daughter Maia, a curious and moody girl whose tight curls of hair are always flying a half-second ahead of her. Then I’ll take the train back to Brooklyn to cook dinner with a girlfriend, a meal we’re planning together. I’m looking forward to kissing these people, to spoiling them with gifts, but the funny thing is that when I think of the day what I picture is the subway and the streets, all the people crippled with Tupperware and giftbags, how thrilled I will be to become one of them, making my way to the highest point in the city alone.

In an age where every guitar twang and ditty is applauded, tough love has a place. But our little ones have the rest of their lives to be shot down by Simon Cowells, writes Guardian comedy critic Brian Logan